Sepidehsadat Sadegi

Sepideh Sadegi (Iran)

ssadegi @ lsw.uni-heidelberg.de

Discovering Extrasolar Planets Hidden by Stellar Jitter

My PhD project involves two surveys. Both are focused on searching for planets beyond our solar system with the radial velocity (RV) method. With the advent of stable high resolutionspectrographs, RV measurements have become exceptionally precise. They enable us to study a new range of exoplanets that could not be studied in detail before due to their intrinsicchallenges. For my PhD thesis, I deal with two types of these challenging exoplanets.

In the first project, l will search for low mass planets around nearby M dwarfs by beating down stellar activity effects using the data that is provided by the CARMENES survey. The goal isto minimize astrophysical systematics caused by stellar activity for the stars in the CARMENES survey, distinguishing between RV signals intrinsic to stars and those due to planetarycompanions, and finding techniques for extracting planetary signals in the presence of an activity signal.

In the second project, I will look for planets in long-period orbits around giant stars and/or in multiple stellar/planetary systems using the data from Lick-Waltz survey. The goal of thisproject is to investigate the nature of the long period variations of G and K giants and determine whether they are due to non-radial pulasation or a planetary companion.